Category Archives: art

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The Gavle Goat has burned again, according to The Local.Se, and of course, it’s Twitter account (yet one more way in which real name policies inhibit natural behavior).

Two quick comments. First, the goat survived longer this year than usual. Second, I think it illustrates something. I’m not sure what. But my yule would be incomplete without a giant straw goat set ablaze.

So Flickr has launched a new redesign, and it’s crowded, jumbled and slow. Now on Flickr with its overlays, its fade-ins and loads, it’s unmoving side and top bars, Flickr’s design takes center stage, elbowing aside the photos that I’m there to see.

So I’m looking for a new community site where the photo I upload is the photo they display without overlays and with enough whitespace that people can consider it as a photograph. I’d like a site where I can talk with other photographers and get feedback, and where they’re happy to let me pay for multiple accounts for the various and separate ways I want to present my work.

500px looks like an interesting possibility, but they seem really heavy on the gamification, showing you “affection”, views, likes, favorites, on every photographer. Also, while their ToS are relatively easy to read, ToS;DRgives them a D.

Apparently, the project manager who found a vendor for the Vermont State Police car decals failed to consider a few things. Such as the risk that prisoners might want to have a little fun at the expense of the police.

You can see the fun if you study the image carefully here, or in a larger version at MSN Photoblog.

Eric Fischer is doing work on comparing locals and tourists and where they photograph based on big Flickr data. It’s fascinating to try to identify cities from the thumbnails in his “Locals and Tourists” set. (I admit, I got very few right, either from “one at a time” or by looking for cities I know.)

This reminds me a lot of Steve Coast’s work on Open Street Map, which I blogged about in “Map of London.” It’s fascinating to watch the implicit maps and the differences emerge from the location data in photos.

Back in September, a group of Czech artists called EPOS 257 camouflaged themselves as city-workers, went to the Palackeho square in Prague and installed a fence. The fence was left on the square with no apparent intent or explanation.

At first, the city council didn’t know about it, and when there were told, they didn’t know how to deal with it – what if somebody put it there for a reason?

The fence stayed for 54 days before being removed.

It’s amazing how encrusted our nominally public spaces have become, and sad to see that it’s not just the US that suffers from this.

The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

There’s a contest, and I like these designs by Michael Tyznik the most. On a graphical level, they look like money. He’s integrated micro-printing, aligned printing (that $5 in the upper left corner, it’s really hard to print so it works when you look at light) and moire patterns to make copying and printing difficult.

But I like them the most because money is liberty coined. As everyone who doesn’t have it knows, without money, you have far less freedom. As the government takes more and more of our money and decides what to give us, our ability to make choices to pursue our own happiness diminish. As we make fewer choices, we lose the habits and lessons of liberty.

Further, as you have more money, you have more choices. You have more ability to take control of your life and make more choices. As you get away from having just enough to get by, you have money to play with. You have the ability to make decisions and implement them. Money empowers you to enjoy liberty and pursue happiness in more ways.

And with the bill of rights on the back of each one, it’s a beautiful way to tie together the money that we use with the liberty that it enables and represents.